“Didn’t know who you were back then,” Munificent whispered. He drew his gun. “I do now, thanks to your incredibly bad timing.”
“My timing is perfect,” the voice replied. “Do you believe yours is better?”
“I’d bet my life on it. Let’s find out. I’ll pull the trigger, and you try to take over my mind before the hammer falls.”
“You say draw, cowboy.”
Munificent clicked back the gun’s hammer.
“Before you kill me in cold blood, officer,” the voice said, “there’s something you should know. Something significant.”
Munificent’s eyes drew narrow. “I already know. I already warned them.”
Suddenly, the image on the screen shrunk and blurred and a familiar hallway came into focus. Students and teachers walked by, but it was like viewing them through a cardboard tube. Then a sea of students filled the auditorium. Suddenly, the tube narrowed, and seemed to peer around a wall, like it was spying on somebody. Dr. Miliron was talking to Mrs. Bagley. The screen blinked, and the backs of two girls appeared, one with gorgeous hair, the other, stick-straight white blond. Kathryn and me.
Another blink, and the Kilodan’s emotionless mask peered down.
The image opened up to full screen. A furious surge of emotion radiated from it for just an instant, then disappeared as quickly as it had come. The voice giggled and a gauntleted finger pointed at Munificent. “I’ll remember that for future reference. Oh, by the way, I’m not the kidnapper this time.”
“Of course not. And you didn’t murder the Morgan family ten years ago.”
“As a matter of fact, I did. But I had several excellent reasons. Can you believe they never returned the boy as I politely asked them to? Refresh my memory. Where did you send their little girl? She’d be, what, maybe fifteen, sixteen, about now?”
Munificent’s anger beat down from the screen. “She’s out of your reach forever.”
Cackling laughter filled the room. “Don’t be so sure. Now if you’ll forgive me, there’s a job opening I simply must create.” A ghostly shadow in the shape of a hand erupted from the gauntlet, and fastened itself on Munificent’s chest, translucent fingers splayed like a spider. They closed and pushed their way inside. Munificent dropped his gun, clutched his heart and struggled for breath, chopping at the misty arm that had embedded itself in his chest. His eyes rolled back. He dropped to his knees, and fell face down on the floor with a wet thud. His body convulsed, then lay still.
Munificent’s dead face expanded to fill the screen, like the killer was kneeling down for a closer look at him. The voice said, “Naive Psi,” and laughed like a jackal. Then the screen panned to the office door, and the reflection of a man wearing loose-fitting black, kneeling over Munificent’s corpse, flashed on the window. He didn’t wear the skull mask I had expected. He didn’t wear any mask at all. In the place where his face should have been, a nearly decomposed head with rotting teeth and shriveled red eyes grinned down at me.
I screamed and pulled my hand away from the electrode plate.
The screen went blank.
Chapter Nine
Return of Nicolaitan
“This is good.” Andy looked worried. “Good in a very, very bad way. It answers questions I would have rather not asked.”
An involuntary spasm shook me. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. “What are you talking about?”
“Egad! What do they teach in school these days?”
“How to avoid foul-smelling things in the locker room. Are you going to explain this to me, or do I have to figure it out for myself?”
“We don’t have that much time. I’ll ‘splain. That misty-looking hand is a Mental Arts technique. It’s called Handless Death. Only the Knights use it. Leaves no mark. They’ll think Amos died of a heart attack.”
“Are you telling me my memory really happened?”
“That wasn’t your memory,” Andy said. “But, yes, it happened. They found Munificent’s body this morning. He knew Skull Head’s identity. Something had just happened that gave it away. He died before he could tell us. I have a bad feeling about this.”
I was going to comment on Andy’s inappropriate use of a perfectly good Star Wars line, but at that moment everything clicked. “Mr. Munificent is dead? Andy, that can’t be right. I just saw him at the assembly. He smiled at me.”
My whole body was numb with disbelief. Then another impossible thought pounded into my brain. “Mr. Munificent connected Mason to the stalker, and now he’s dead. I suspected that Mason was a Knight, and knew he was a jerk. But I never thought he was a murderer.”
Andy put his hand on my shoulder. “Rinnie, Mason has killed before.”
Horror shot through me. My stomach heaved. I tried to talk, but didn’t have words. I just stared up at Andy.
“He had a very abusive mother. He killed her with a shovel. His father covered it up. The Kilodan saw it in the mayor’s mind.”
“A shovel? Oh, that’s— Wait, I thought she was in a mental hospital.”